While looking for news and views on the current mess in Iraq, I ended up distracted by a blog called “WeaponsMan”.
His qualifications to talk about guns? Here’s what he tells us:
WeaponsMan is a blog about weapons. Primarily ground combat weapons, primarily small arms and man-portable crew-served weapons. The site owner is a former Special Forces weapons man (MOS 18B; before the 18 series, 11B with Skill Qualification Indicator of S), and you can expect any guest columnists to be similarly qualified.
Our focus is on weapons: their history, effects and employment. This is not your go-to place for gun laws or gun politics; other people have that covered.
WHY WEAPONSMAN?
A lot of nonsense is written about weapons, especially on the Net. Rather than rail at the nonsense, we thought we’d talk sense instead, and see how that catches on.
Well, sir, it is indeed ‘catching on’, even as the brainless Left ratchets up their screaming spasms of irrational hyperbole when someone says “gun” or when a child pretends to have one using a piece of toast, or a little boy draws a picture of a weapon, causing apoplexy among the putative adults, the Big People In Charge who haven’t a clue, nor a cluebag to put it in.
These indoctrinated folk are becoming unhinged. We need more light and a lot less heat on this subject, but the places under the lamppost are few and far between.
I’ll get the Baron to add “WeaponsMan” to our blogroll. Meanwhile here’s a post from April, the only changes being my emphases and some formatting, plus an editorial comment. Or two.
10 Things about Murderers we Learned from “The First 48.”
Unlike most TV cop shows, this one showcases real murders, and therefore, real murderers. Here are 10 things about murderers that you’ll never pick up if you watch scripted TV shows, but any homicide cop could have told you:
1. Murderers are career criminals, usually. Criminals are generally pretty stupid people. For every Professor Moriarty in fiction, there’s ten thousand full-retard street criminals in the Lifer Wing of the jug. 2. Most victims don’t die for anything big. They are killed in petty disputes, or in the pursuit of de minimis thefts. 3. There’s usually a lot of emotion involved in a murder. The exceptions are the robberies. 4. A robbery turned murder is not, despite the show and even the cops using the term, a “robbery gone wrong.” It’s a robbery gone one of the two ways the robbers expected it to go; if some armed robbers never kill any of their victims, that’s strictly accidental. (This, then, suggests we ought to hit armed robbers a little harder in the sentence department; execution would work). 5. Victims’ lives often parallel their murderers’ [lives] closely. For example, those shot by dope peddlers are usually fellow dope peddlers. Others are victims of their own bad taste in romantic partners. A few had the bad fortune to own something shiny that caught the eye of Self Esteem Generation, who killed them to perpetrate thefts. 6. The younger the criminal, the more self-centered and depraved he or she tends to be.[Make that 99% “HE”. At the moment, girls don’t kill as often and when they do, they slash; they don’t like noise. However, with “gender equality” being shoved down our throats, look for gun numbers among violent gurrls to increase —D] 7. The entitlement culture is often comorbid in these young robbers. Sometimes a victim is a “striver,” trying to get ahead by honest means; the murderer never is. 8. Murder is a crime of bad neighborhoods, and the neighborhood is bad for the same reason the murders happen there: there’s a lot of untended human pathogens there. 9. None of the murderers have ever been productive human beings, and no good can come of releasing them some day. It would be more humane to put them down like rabid dogs, not least for their future victims. 10. There is an uncomfortable racial element to murder statistics that is highly visible in these case studies, but it’s hard to tease out any real racial effect from the pernicious effects of American urban and welfare policy.
There are also things we’ve never seen.
- We’ve never seen a murder done with a legally-bought firearm on the show.
- We’ve never seen a murder where the firearm precipitated the crime. (It may have contributed to hotheaded urban “disrespect” killings).
- We’ve never seen a suspect who turned out to be someone from the “gun culture” — considering how standard that plot point is in TV, it seems to be a screenwriter fantasy of a piece with the same guys’ dread of “Eurotrash neo-nazis,” a group which has the virtue, from Hollywood’s viewpoint, of being too small and nonexistent to pursue a defamation action.
Because The First 48 (the TV show linked above) deals with facts as they are, it’s nothing short of amazing that it’s allowed on the tube.
What he doesn’t say directly, though he alludes to it, is the origin of this nigh-incurable and metastasizing tumor on the body politic: the rapid spread of the welfare state via the socialists in Congress who voted in Lyndon Johnson’s destructive “War on Poverty”, an engagement Poverty has won, hands down.
That move by LBJ and the Dems was a cynical and successful ploy to buy the black vote. You can see some parallels to post-WWII Britain’s calamitous decision to vote in socialism before they — equally cynically — foisted off onto their indigenous population the destructive waves of mass immigration. That was floods of people who hated the host population. And America, a little slow on the uptake, is now seeing the same horror perpetrated on its citizens by the elite politicians. As in Britain, there won’t be any referendum here, either.
Like many of our American readers I am mighty tired of the litany of woe described endlessly by our intelligentsia. Some of what they preach is merely wrong, but not all. There is a large portion of deliberate obfuscation and lies. For them, any means to support their calamitous end of a gun-free America.
The Weapons Man gives hope: even in deep blue Massachusetts, they’re getting sick of being understanding about plain old ugly evil, as he points out. For the full context, though, this story is from The Boston Herald, not The Globe, the latter being perennially a blue rag mouthpiece for the elites. I read a headline on Drudge yesterday that says some of the illegal immigrant planeloads are being routed to Massachusetts. That should be… umm, interesting. For real fun, they ought to put them in South Boston and stand back. Two lovely Catholic cultures, Hispanic and Irish, who will lead the rest of us by their kindly lights.
Well back to my research on the situation in Iraq. That place Obama abandoned and crossed off his to-do list years ago, just as he is aiming to do in Afghanistan. See, the problem with BO is that he’s a lover, not a fighter. You can tell by the warmth of his down-to-earth style and his winning ways with the legislative branch… those “ways” include telling Congress to stick a sock in it since he won.
Have you ever seen a Pyrrhic victory that big? Unfortunately, it was so very large that it appears to have cut off the circulation to his head.
There’s so much out there about the meltdown in Iraq that it’s anyone’s guess if I’ll get the post up before the American embassy in Iraq closes. Oh wait… is there a video out there somewhere which will enrage a spontaneous crowd into… never mind. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
I’ll check that site out. Love your summing up – though, I just wish it wasn’t true.
You wish it weren’t true?? But the truth sets you free, Nemesis. That was easier before Freud and physics relativized everything. Watch where physics is going…in the end, that’s where we’re all headed.
Could never get my head around physics – layman terms suit me just fine.
‘The truth sets you free’ – yes indeed it does! And there was I just after 9/11 wondering what kind of world had just blown up my retirement years of longed for peace and tranquillity!
Of Course we can’t neglect our own reality as it is in this life, that would be ignoring one of the reasons for our existence. It is one thing to believe that ‘science’ can be our ‘salvation’ as a species while ignoring other ‘avenues’ of investigation -such as the paranormal, but it is quite another to completely ignore it. And while the Nazis were big on symbols and necromancy which they infused into their ‘science’ – and some would say that very concept put them years ahead of the rest as far as weapons of mass destruction went – where did it really get them in the end?
And even for the religious, Stalin and the Mao recognized that to close down all the Churches and religious institutions would only cause it all to go under ground. Much better to have it out in the open…but to a certain level….. to keep an eye on it!
Science as we now practise it is too rigid in its parameters for what passes as subjects worth investigating, and in that regard, we should also take on board how ‘scientific’ methods in some quarters, i.e., Global Warming Theory, can be compromised when governments or agencies require a specific result from the ‘method’ used for the money spent on it. And then there is the backlash from the scientific community against those who have ventured outside the ‘norms’ of scientific investigation to arrive at some startling results – such as Nikola Tesla – which reinforces that very ‘unscientific’ rigidness.
Open minds are better than closed minds and no matter how clever we may believe we think we are, there is always something else to learn. Never stop learning.
In the end, math (reality) always wins. The ordering principles we know as the laws of physics, together with the rules of logic inform us as to what is possible while putting inviolable limits on what is not possible. If, we as individuals and as a society made the deliberate choice to order our lives and political decisions governed by these constraints, then the world would not be in the mess it’s in.
It is one of those ironies of our modern times that those on the progressive side of the political spectrum, despite all of their claims to being science and “fact” based, are in actuality one of the most superstitious and magical thinking segment of our society.
My understanding of physics is that the so called modern world is just touching the surface of what life and the ‘physics’ of our surroundings truly mean for us. We think we are clever, but in reality we know nothing when it comes to the realities of existence which are invariably dismissed out of hand as not being scientifically based.
There is much more to our world than ‘physics’ and mathematics.
True. Shakespeare made the same point. But why ignore the fundamentals on which our world are based?? Without those mathematicians this conversation would not be possible.
People who fail to grasp the fundamentals -include economics here since it’s a subset of maths – end up doing silly, destructive things or believing impossibilities – e.g., that taking money away from the rich and doling it out to the poor will improve the lot of either group. A grasp of math would make that point clear.
Ask wildiris about the greenies who put nails through trees in order to kill unsuspecting loggers – for the love of Gaia, naturally. All the while they are abysmally ignorant of sound environmental science. But they feel virtuous, right?
Physics is exciting, even at a basic level. Heisenberg’s principles are mind-blowing. A bare understanding doesn’t make us feel clever, when we ‘get’ it, the real response is wonder, awe. Humility.
I would agree that those who fall for scientism have missed the point. Science has its own appropriate realm. So does blank verse. So does religious belief. But they don’t cancel one another out, surely?
Nemesis, I think you’re reading too much into my words. When I refer to the rules of logic and the laws of physics, I’m not making any grand cosmic or spiritual inferences. I was just referring to the simple and mundane things like 2 + 2 = 4 and the law of gravity, for example.
The reason that our country is in such a budgetary mess is that far too many people now honestly believe that 2 + 2 could be 5 or 6 or 7 or whatever the current main-stream-media driven popular consensus might be. If for some reason, insisting that 2 + 2 = 4 and only 4 causes a certain percentage of minorities to fail their high school math class, then obviously that’s a racist statement and the math textbook has to be changed.
Dymphna’s point about economics is math is dead on. Our government passed laws that forced banks to give loans to people that could not possibly pay them back, and look what it did to our economy. Computer programs are rigidly logical in their structure, but the 2000+ page Affordable Healthcare Act was replete with mutually contradictory requirements; and people wonder why translating Obamacare into a functional web site has proven such an impossible task. In a world were logic was held sacred, Obamacare would have never passed the proverbial laugh test, let alone be made into national law.
When it comes to academic performance, IQ does matter. But to suggest that simple fact can be a career- ender for any teacher or administrator. A simple undergraduate level engineering analysis done one of those large wind turbine generators would easily show that it takes more energy to make, install, operate and maintain one, than it will ever return, in its lifetime, to the grid. But somehow building them is considered “green”?
My biggest pet peeve is the constant rejection of the Law of Excluded Middle; the insistence that we all have our own truths, (In Episcopalian speak: pluriform truth). One is free to say that, but once you do, you no longer have access to the rules of logic and the ability to have a rational debate ends. And when rational debate ends, all that’s left is emotional appeals and intimidation.
Wildress, understand completely where you are coming from. Common sense is in short supply these days for those who rely on a handout for survival and care not for taking up responsibility for their own affairs – as it always used to be.
My comment is aimed more at the lack of a real education as to why we are here on Earth, not for the basics of understanding the physical realm we live in.
Iraq – Suppose the moral of the story is that an ideology that is already of the stone age can not be bombed back to the stone age. Regime change and humanitarian interventions have been built on a foreign policy of moral rubble that has been of great advantage to the enemy, why not keep our heads, let the dust settle and the ideological bloodletting seep into the desert sand before seeking advantage.
Can’t agree with your description of the Brits’ voting for socialism after WW2 as “calamitous”. Our returning troops and their families generally had huge respect for Churchill, as do I, but he was a better defender of democracy than a democrat.
Servicemen encountered snobbery and elitism from many of the officer class who commanded them- the kind of class distinction the Baron has rightly criticised- and recalled unfulfilled promises of a “land fit for heroes” when their fathers returned from WW1, and they’d had enough.
Compromises had to be made because we owed so much money to the US, which is why almost 70 years later the NHS pays for most of my medical care, but not the whole cost of dental and eye care (the debt in lives lost can of course never be repaid). But much as I respect and admire Americans and their country, I wouldn’t want to live there, and this has much to do with the residue (now sadly being eroded) of the Welfare State set up by the postwar Labour government.
The reason the welfare mob exists is because they vote. They are paid without generating a 1099-GOV. THey are free agents as long as there is enough wealth to steal from the middle class. Once that is gone they will compete with organized producers…with predictable results.
Yes. We’ve been echoing that since LBJ and his cronies started the Big Govt War on Poverty. A cynical joke designed to make black voters feel secure only when they voted for Democrats…even though historically the Dems kept blacks in servitude.
I agree with you except for the “predictable” results. Who knows what the grossly entitled will do when their government-given entitlements are gone? It could be chaotic. Same with the non-working class in the UK. Until this past generation, we never had a whole group of adults who’d lived without ever working for a living. That has degraded every culture infected with it.